AWS CodePipeline

The AWS CodePipeline service is very well suited if you already use Amazon Web Services for some of your other Cloud needs. Also, if you want to be agile in your web application development, a continuous delivery service like AWS CodePipeline will be very useful and will make deployment faster, easier and well built.

It is very suited for automation of build, data migration, deployment, and tests for a stack for every push on a branch (or with a different configuration). For large projects, this is great. It facilitates the process of development and testing. Sometimes the space (and costs) are a constraint but the facility is worth it.

AWS CodePipeline is the best solution to use if your application stack is completely AWS-native. This means you are exclusively using AWS tools to manage your source control, build management, and you are deploying your applications to AWS services such as EC2, Elastic Beanstalk, Lambda, EMR, etc. It integrates very well with AWS CodeCommit, CodeBuild, and Elastic Beanstalk to manage source control, building, and deployment. However, it does not integrate too well with third-party source control and build management tools such as Github, Travis, Jenkins, CodeShip, etc.

We didn't need a lot of support with AWS CodePipeline as it was pretty straightforward to configure and use, but where we ran into problems, the AWS community was able to help. AWS support agents were also helpful in resolving some of the minor issues we encountered, which we could not find a solution elsewhere.

AWS CodePipeline is well suited for a specific software engineering workflow. If there is a need to deploy code within a framework, then this is a great tool to automate the code deployments outward. The scenarios where it is less appropriate is in situations of internal tooling or other code that might not change as often or are tools running locally.

Overall, I give AWS Codepipeline a 9 because it gets the job done and I can't complain much about the web interface as much of the action is taking place behind the scenes on the terminal locally or via Amazon's infrastructure anyway. It would be nicer to have a better flowing and visualizable web interface, however.

AWS Support is bar none and I have access to dedicated account managers on the business level so they can help me with any questions I have regarding their product. No complaints there at all because they have dedicated support engineers who can help me understand the product well.

If you're already on AWS, then using it as your build/test/deploy system makes a lot of sense. However, there are easier tools out there to do it that may not be as flexible, or may work better with your source control system.

It could be a little quicker at running its processes/stages. But it's reliable and backed by AWS so you know it doesn't go down often.

Like anything AWS, there is a steep learning curve involving permissions, new terminology, and a slightly confusing interface or CLI.